As we’ve reported users running Screen Readers on their device can request Chrome to get image descriptions from Google for images that don’t have alt text, the work has begun on that, the latest version of Chrome Canary has added new “Accessibility image descriptions ” flag to about:flags page.
Here is the what the about:flags page says about the new accessibility image descriptions flag “Enables Screen Reader users to request computer generated descriptions of unlabelled images using the Page context menu”.
For Chrome browser to bring automatic image descriptions from Google
1. Ensure you’re using latest Chrome Canary version
2. Visit about:flags page
3. Find “Accessibility Image descriptions” flag
4. Select Enabled, relaunch the browser.
5. Make sure you’ve screen reader such as NVDA installed or use the built-in Screen Reader Vox Chrome OS provides,
6. Visit any webpage that contains images, right click on any one and select “Get image descriptions from Google” choose either “always” or “once”, options are self-explanatory.
If you want the image descriptions keep coming from Google, choose Always Later. you can visit Accessibility Settings and turn the feature off.
As Screen Reader reads the text, images don’t’ have alt text won’t be skipped, it will read out the description provided by Google, do note, the images will be sent to Google for scanning and after that description will be returned to the user device, this all happens quickly.
As we said before, the Google Accessibility team officially announced the feature coming later this year to Google Chrome.
On the other side, Microsoft is looking to bring native caret browsing and high contrast mode to Chromium to make them available in their Edge browser powered by Chromium. So, Microsoft and Google both giving priority to Accessibility features.